Friday, August 8, 2008

Alberta

Since Grande Cache, I've been through Jasper, Banff, Drumheller, Vulcan, and am now in Calgary.

Jasper is pretty cool, a little town with tons of hiking and camping around its perimeter. The Icefields Highway is possibly the most awesome stretch of road I've ever driven.

Banff is like if you gave a shopping mall its own zip code. It has nature and stuff around it, but even their own hiking guides say "do this hike in the early morning or late evening to avoid the hordes." The fact that they use the word hordes gives you an idea of how immensely crowded this place is. I can see how people would enjoy going there and shopping and dining and blargle blah bloo blah, but it isn't for me.

I visited some of the areas surrounding Calgary - Drumheller, Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Vulcan. Drumheller is all crazy about dinosaurs - there are these dinosaur statues everywhere - like almost literally on every street corner. The city logo is a fossilized T-Rex, the street lamps have dinosaurs attached to them, they're the home of the "world's largest dinosaur..." the list goes on. It was a cool place though, well worth the trip.

Dinosaur park was less full of dinosaurs, and more full of Canadian Badlands. These are some surreal sections of earth. Again, well worth the trip.

Also stopped by Vulcan, AB. This town recently started going all star-trek like to attract tourists. It doesn't seem to have worked incredibly well as their star trek murals have been deteriorating, no effort has been made to restore them, "Spock's Bar" closed... Despite this, I enjoyed a Spock Burger at the Enterprise Cafe.

1 Comments:

AHHHH! "open the door, get on the floor, everybody (something) the dinosaur!" I couldn't remember what you said....but I liked it! And couldn't believe tht you would sing that in the petrified dinosaur! I am still so jealous that you got to actually BE IN A REAL ONE!